Saturday, June 4, 2011

As many of you know, this year marks the first year that the fine folks at the North Texas RPG Con are giving out the Three Castles Award. The Award

was conceived by Robert Kuntz and with the able assistance of Douglas Rhea forwarded as an award to be presented to designers of the highest merit for outstanding work in the industry of Role Playing Game design. Only one such award can be given annually. And due to the exacting guidelines used for determining what qualifies as an exemplary design, only those designs that match or exceed the guidelines can qualify to be awarded. If no entry meets these criteria, no award is achieved for that year.

Doug Rhea gave me permission to announce the winner of this year's award on my blog shortly after it it was revealed at NTRPGCon this evening, so it is with great pleasure that I inform the wider old school community that the 2011 winner of the first ever Three Dragons Award is Michael Curtis for his work on The Dungeon Alphabet.

Frankly, all five of those products deserved it -- they are all "must-haves" as far as I'm concerned. But the DUNGEON ALPHABET is a concise, highly inspirational "classic" and Michael Curtis is highly deserving of this honor. Kudos to MC and to all the nominees!

My memory must be lousy, because I thought this award was intended to be anti-OSR (Raggi in particular).

I think what you're remembering is that Kuntz and Kask both had an online tussle with Raggi and, to a lesser degree, with the whole notion of an old school renaissance. The award itself is independent of its judges (and its judges are rotated), so whatever their feelings might or might not be, it's not reflective of what the award is about.

Kudos to Michael, and to the other four nominees for also producing wonderful products, and to Rob Kuntz and Douglas Rhea for conceiving and executing this award. This is a good development all around.

Really? I see this as a total crock. Kuntz is a never-was (three castles, eh?), and Rhea is a dumb-ass richie with no self-esteem who's decided to buy himself a convention. How is this significant? And I'm with Antonio, the winning entry is next to useless.

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